


cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean

by madamebadger



Series: I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Crying, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Tears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 23:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4369247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Cassandra sees Josephine crying, and the first time Josephine sees Cassandra crying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean

The first time Cassandra ever sees Josephine cry, it is their fourth week in Haven and she is visiting the ambassador’s office (under some duress; Leliana had given her quite a _look_ ) to provide information about the Nevarran nobility. She’d put it off as long as she could manage, but–well, again, Leliana’s look.

So perhaps she isn’t in the best mood when she swings the door open, but her irritation vanishes to be replaced with dismay when she sees Lady Montilyet, behind her makeshift desk, weeping.

Lady Montilyet weeps in a very refined fashion; naturally she does, Cassandra thinks, irrelevantly and with no little envy (she turns snively and blotchy and hideous when she permits herself tears). Her eyes are pink but not bloodshot, her face not contorted, and–perhaps thanks to her coloring–she has not turned a ridiculous spotty shade of maroon. Apart from her eye makeup, which is beginning to run, she looks very nearly elegant even in tears.

Cassandra’s first instinct is to back away and close the door. There are two reasons for this. The first is that she hates to cry but especially hates to cry before an audience, and she would give Lady Montilyet the same privacy. But the second, shamefully, is pure cowardice. She doesn’t know what to _do_ with people when they cry. Leliana is a wonder with the bereft and the grieving–when she’s in the mood to be, which is less and less the case these days, but that’s another issue entirely–but Cassandra never knows what to do except to look anywhere but their tearful faces and perhaps pat them awkwardly on the shoulder.

But Lady Montilyet has looked up, and now it’s too late to sneak back out. She wipes tears from under her eyes with the edge of one palm and says, in a thick voice, “I’m sorry, Seeker Pentaghast. Just a moment.”

“Of course,” Cassandra says, and after a moment remembers her manners and fumbles for a handkerchief, which she passes over to Lady Montilyet. (Lady Montilyet no doubt has many handkerchiefs of her own, but equally likely, her handkerchiefs are those dainty lacy perfumed things that are no use at all for actually cleaning yourself up. Cassandra exclusively carries the thick cotton handkerchiefs that, in Orlais, are solely the province of men: if she needs a handkerchief, she needs it to _work_.)

“Thank you,” Lady Montilyet says, wiping away her smeared makeup.

And once again, Cassandra is at sea. “What’s troubling you?”

“Oh,” Lady Montilyet says, looking down at her desk, “I received word that one of my agents–Minda–was killed on the road.”

Cassandra straightens. “Assassinated?”

“No, no. I had sent a small contingent to Denerim to make contact with a bann, who I–well, it doesn’t matter now. They ran afoul of the fighting between the mages and templars, and Minda was killed. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.“

"The roads are dangerous now,” Cassandra says, for lack of anything better to say. “You and she were close?”

Lady Montilyet dabs at her eyes again, and draws a shaky breath. “Not especially,” she says. “But we had worked together for several years and she came with me at my request. She was a bright young woman, promising… it is simply… it is hard to know that she will never again come into my office with a report, that I will not see her face again. That all that she was and could have been is lost.” She folds the handkerchief carefully. “I suppose it must seem–well, I am sure that you are accustomed to such things as this, but it is new to me. Certainly assassinations and attacks do happen in diplomatic spheres, but–”

“I wouldn’t say I’m accustomed to it. The Seekers do not lose so many members as all that,” Cassandra says, and though she isn’t trying to be funny that earns a watery chuckle from Lady Montilyet anyway. 

“No,” Lady Montilyet says. “I suppose not. Thank you for the handkerchief; I will return it to you once it has been laundered.”

Cassandra waves her hand, to express that it is less than no concern. 

“Now,” Lady Montilyet says. “What did you come to see me about?”

“I can come back later, if you would rather.”

“No, I think I would prefer the distraction, if you don’t mind.”

“Leliana has been bothering me to provide you information about my… ties, such as they are… to the Nevarran nobility,” Cassandra says, and by the way Lady Montilyet straightens, she can tell that this will be quite an _effective_ distraction. _Well,_ she thinks ruefully as she draws up a chair, _that is at least some good use for my inconvenient family…._

__

* * *

The first time Josephine sees Cassandra cry, they have known each other for nigh on two years; have been romantically involved for more than a year. And she had idly wondered, from time to time, whether Cassandra ever _did_ cry.

Certainly she has wept before Cassandra more than once, even before they became intimate. After Haven, of course–the sheer senseless magnitude of that loss, so many lives cut short, and even while arguing with Cullen and Cassandra she had not been able to stem her tears, which seemed to freeze to her cheeks in the bone-curling mountain wind. And then later, when she learned of the murder of her messengers by the House of Repose–her relationship with Cassandra had been a new thing then, tentative and delicate. And she had known, by then, that Cassandra was awkward and uncomfortable with words–but Cassandra had held her as she wept, and that was all she needed.

But Cassandra never cried in front of her; as far as she could tell, Cassandra never cried at all. 

So it is a surprise to enter her room–which now, in truth, is more _the room they share_ , though Cassandra still keeps her spartan space above the forge–and see Cassandra sitting on the edge of the bed facing away from her. Her head is bent and she doesn’t look up, which is unusual; Cassandra is alert to a fault and always looks when someone enters a room that she’s in. 

Her shoulders are shaking. It takes Josephine a moment to realize that she's _crying_.

Weeping people are not foreign to Josephine. She has passed around handkerchiefs and said any number of appropriate things, from, “I’m so sorry for your loss, I will miss him enormously,” to “It is such a terrible blow, but I have faith that you can rebuild,” to “We will mend this.” (She has also, from time to time, _made_ people cry–but only when she felt it entirely justified.)

But Cassandra. Cassandra is stern and soft, tough and vulnerable, blunt and forthright and yet deeply private. After a moment, Josephine says, “Would you rather I left?”

Cassandra is quiet for so long that Josephine prepares herself to leave, and then finally she says–her voice more raw than Josephine has ever heard it–“No. Stay. Please.”

Josephine stays. 

She crawls across the bed–it seems to her, somehow, _wrong_ to circle around, to look Cassandra in the face when she so clearly is uncomfortable. So she crawls across the bed and presses herself against Cassandra’s back, curls her arms around Cassandra’s waist. So close she can hear the hard jagged rhythm of Cassandra’s breaths, can feel the way her body jerks with each sob.

Cassandra weeps as if it is a struggle. She weeps as if each tear is a battle hard-fought and lost. Her sorrow chokes her and she shakes her head like an angry animal, with misery an enemy at its throat to be thrown off. 

Josephine is most comfortable with words. Ever since she was a small child, problems in her life have been solved–or unsolved–with words, with talking, with the cascade of conversation. It is a stereotype that Antivan families talk and talk and talk–talk over and around each other, a spiral of words–but in her case it is not an entirely untrue stereotype.

But Cassandra… is uncomfortable with words. It is something that Josephine has had to learn, carefully and sometimes painfully. Cassandra loves beautiful words, but she also mistrusts them. Cassandra trusts and relies on actions. Cassandra’s most intimate language is that of touch and gesture.

So, though she aches to ask what is wrong, to soothe and soften with her voice… Josephine is silent. Holds her, as she shakes with each bitter tear, wrought from her with the difficulty of a battle lost–or, perhaps, won.

After a long moment, Cassandra shifts on the bed. She turns in Josephine’s arms, and for a moment Josephine can see her face: eyes red, lips drawn back in a snarl of pain, cheeks fever-bright. And then Cassandra presses her closed eyes against the join of Josephine’s shoulder and throat and wraps her arms around Josephine.

Her embrace is so tight that it is uncomfortable, bordering on painful, but Josephine would rather gnaw her own hand off than say so. She holds Cassandra, stroking her hair as Cassandra sobs into her shoulder, tears hot and bright through the fabric of her dress.

Once the tears have slowed, she runs her hand along Cassandra’s spine, and says, softly, “What happened?”

“Daniel,” Cassandra says. “He was–they put a demon in him. Somehow. He–I had to kill him. He asked me to kill him.” She swallows, audible and glutinous. “ _Maker_ , of all the people I–but I had to, he asked me to, there was no choice–”

It isn’t Josephine that she is asking for absolution, Josephine knows, and so she says nothing as Cassandra shudders in her arms. 

(Cassandra doesn’t talk easily about the people who are important to her. She tells stories–war stories–readily enough, but you must interpret them yourself. And yet even so, Josephine knows about Daniel. Daniel, Cassandra’s best and favorite apprentice; Daniel, quick and clever and thoughtful. “He’s a hard worker,” Cassandra said once–and that, from her, is the highest of praise.

Cassandra doesn’t talk easily about the people who are important to her, but Josephine knows that Daniel was as close to a son as Cassandra ever expected to have.)

After a long time, Cassandra’s shaking sobs wear themselves out. After a long time, Cassandra lifts her face from Josephine’s tear-damp shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she croaks.

“There is nothing to be sorry for,” Josephine says.

“I have borne it,” Cassandra says, “without falling apart, ever since we were at Caer Oswin. I have borne it; I don’t know why I couldn’t bear it longer–”

“Because you didn’t have to,” Josephine says, stroking the back of her neck. “You don’t have to. My love, you don’t have to bear it forever–”

Cassandra makes a noise, not a sob, not a cry, but simply a noise, hard and broken. Josephine pulls her close until she can feel the thunder of Cassandra’s grief, tight and taut in her belly.

“You don’t have to bear it alone forever,” she says.

It is some time later, Josephine doesn’t know how long, that Cassandra’s breathing evens out, that the pulse of her heart quiets. “Thank you,” she says.

Josephine kisses her sweaty temple. “Always,” she says. “You are so kind to me when I am falling apart.”

Cassandra laughs, or tries to, the sound rough and rusty. “Even in pieces you are magnificent,” she says.

Josephine kisses her forehead again. “You are entirely too flattering,” she says. And then: “Would you like to talk about Daniel?”

Cassandra is silent for a time, but her breaths don’t change. After a little while, she says, “Most often those who sought to be my apprentices were nobles–third or fourth sons who wanted a taste of glory. But Daniel was a farmer’s boy. You could tell, too, he swung a sword as if it was a scythe–”

Josephine strokes her back, and listens.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the poem [Consolation](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/177886), by Wislawa Syzmborska


End file.
